We asked our critics and our readers to vote for the 10 Most Important Works of the Decade. We count down to No. 1 as we approach Dec. 31.

You don't "play a golfing video game" with the Wii; you golf, or at least engage in a very golfing-like pantomime.

By:Darren ZenkoSpecial to the Star, Published on Sat Dec 26 2009

We asked our critics and our readers to vote for the 10 Most Important Works of the Decade. We count down to No. 1 as we approach Dec. 31.

Since the dawn of video games, when a sweet grey-haired biddy shouted "Take that, turkey!" in a 1982 commercial for Atari's Berzerk, they've been selling us the dream: multi-generational gaming, mom and dad and gramps and little Suzy all crowded around the family television enjoying the wonders of interactive digital play. But it took until the 2006 release of Nintendo's Wii – and the Wii Sports package that came with it – for the dream to move to fun-for-the-whole-family reality.

When Nintendo first announced its new Wii console, then still code-named "Revolution," the skepticism – outright derision, really – from gaming's hoi polloi was nearly universal. The system's motion-sensing technology, derided as "waggle controls," was seen as a gimmick, another of the weird missteps that made mighty Nintendo such an endearingly clumsy giant. Underpowered and unserious, Wii was to be the next Power Glove, to follow the wrong- headed Virtual Boy into the "What were they thinking?" file.

Four years and 60 million shipped units later, who's laughing now? Well, a lot of the same jokers, actually; from the point of view of the serious gamer, Wii is underpowered and unserious. But what Wii Sports showed was that games could have a mass audience beyond that core, that a game could forsake supercomputer tech-specs and photorealistic dismemberment and go on to reap a cash harvest from a whole new field of customers. All it had to do was be perfectly fun and accessible.

That's the magic of Wii Sports: accessibility.

The greatest barrier to turning non-gamers into happy players is largely a question of vocabulary; traditional video games have an idiom, a language mediated by increasingly bloated and complicated controllers. These button-crammed puzzle boxes leave grandma flustered and confused. Wii Sports won out by speaking in human vernacular. You don't "play a bowling video game" here; you bowl, or at least engage in a very bowling-like pantomime. The space between a new player's first tentative waggle and the rush of mastery that is the payoff of all video games is measured in minutes. Beyond that, it's socially hilarious; it's just plain funny to watch friends and family flail around.

And so a phenomenon was born. You may have your own Wii anecdote; my own personal favourite was getting blanked by my mother-in-law in Wii Sports Tennis as the game read the natural flow of her deadly serve, developed years ago on the clay courts of her salad days. The TV news still regularly airs features on this or that seniors' facility that's hooked up a Wii, with footage of folks throwing strikes or flail-boxing.

There's a pitfall here, though. A lot of these new video gamers aren't really video gamers. They're Wii players, and for them "playing Wii" means "playing Wii Sports." It remains to be seen to what degree the Wii Sports bubble carries over into a longer-term expansion of the demographics for games as a whole. Still, the model has been proven, and every other company in the video-game market is doing its damnedest to monetize that great mass of humanity that would rather wave their arms than fuss with a controller. Wii Sports has permanently changed the game of games. Take that, turkey!

SERIES SO FAR

Monday: No. 10, Mad Men

Tuesday: No. 9, Borat

Wednesday: No. 8, "I Dreamed a Dream"

Thursday: No. 7, Fahrenheit 9/11

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